Black Forest is the highest, coldest, most rural part of our coverage, it is almost entirely on wells and septic, and it is the community that lost 486 homes in 2013. All four of those change what a water loss looks like here.
Water damage
Five things, and they compound.
Elevation. Black Forest sits at roughly 7,500 feet — around 1,500 feet above Fountain at the other end of the county, and higher than any other ground in our standard coverage. Colder nights, longer freeze windows, and a heating season that starts earlier and ends later.
No municipal utilities across most of it. Private wells for water, onsite wastewater treatment systems for sewage. When something fails here, there is no utility to call.
Acreage. Lots are measured in acres, not feet. Runoff arrives across your property rather than through a storm system, and the nearest neighbour is not close enough to notice water running.
Soil that behaves differently. Rocky granite and clay with a deep water table. Septic designs here are frequently customised to a site-specific soils report rather than pulled off a standard detail — which tells you something about how variable the ground is.
And the fire. In June 2013 this community lost 486 homes. A large share of what stands here now was built after that, on ground that burned.
Colorado Springs
Black Forest. The core of the zone — heavily treed acreage north and east of the metro, running along Black Forest Road, Shoup Road, Vollmer Road and Burgess Road. Mixed housing eras with a substantial post-2013 rebuild component.
Falcon. East along Highway 24, with a mix of rural acreage and newer subdivision development as growth pushed out from the Powers corridor.
The rural fringe between them — properties that are neither fully Black Forest nor fully Falcon, on wells and septic, with genuinely long access.
Boundary note: 80908 is a large postal delivery area and it does not follow community boundaries. If you are on an edge, call and tell us the cross roads rather than the ZIP.
Water damage
Yes, and it deserves a straight answer rather than either dismissal or alarm.
What the fire was. The Black Forest Fire was reported on 11 June 2013 and fully contained on 21 June. It burned 14,280 acres, destroyed 486 homes, damaged 37 more, and killed two people. It surpassed the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in structures lost and became the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history by that measure. It burned entirely within Black Forest and El Paso County.
Why it still affects water thirteen years later. Intense heat creates a water-repellent layer near the soil surface and destroys the vegetation and root structure that used to slow runoff. Rain that would have soaked in sheets off instead. Recovery of a severely burned watershed is measured in decades, not years — and restoration work on the Black Forest scar has been ongoing since.
What it means for your property specifically: it depends on what is uphill of you and how that ground recovered, and that is a site question rather than a ZIP-code question. Some of this scar has recovered substantially. Some drainages have not. Anyone telling you 80908 is uniformly at risk — or uniformly fine — is not looking at your land.
What we will say plainly: if water arrives across your property during a summer storm and it carries ash, sediment or debris, treat it as Category 3. It is not clean water and it does not get dried and saved.
And the coverage point: standard homeowners policies exclude flood, meaning surface water arriving from outdoors. Post-fire runoff across your land is exactly that. Flood coverage is separate — through the NFIP or a private carrier, with a 30-day waiting period before a new policy takes effect.
We do not determine flood zone status and cannot tell you whether your property is in one. Coverage depends on your specific policy.
Colorado Springs
It is a Category 3 loss and the protocol is not negotiable.
Onsite wastewater treatment systems in El Paso County are permitted, inspected and regulated by El Paso County Public Health. Since 1 January 2024, permit applications must be submitted by a licensed OWTS installer. Systems here are frequently designed to a site-specific soils report because the granite-and-clay ground is variable enough that a standard detail does not always work.
How failures present:
What we do, and what we do not. We do the cleanup: containment, protective equipment, HEPA filtration, extraction, removal of porous materials the sewage reached, antimicrobial treatment, and drying to a documented standard. Carpet, pad and drywall the sewage contacted come out. They do not get dried and saved. Anyone telling you otherwise is not working to standard.
We do not pump, repair, design or replace the system. That is a licensed OWTS contractor’s work, and it has to happen or the cleanup is pointless — the failure will simply recur.
Two things worth knowing before you need them: know where your tank and leach field actually are, and know when the system was last pumped. Both are things people discover they do not know at exactly the wrong moment. El Paso County OWTS records are viewable through the County Assessor’s property search.
Tell us where it came from and how long it has been there. We will give you a time, not a window.
24/7 — Colorado Springs and El Paso County
Water damage
A well is a mechanical system, and mechanical systems fail — usually at the worst time.
Where the water comes from when a well property floods:
And the thing that catches people: when the power goes out, so does your water. A well pump needs electricity. That means no water to flush, no water to clean up with, and — if you are on a septic system with a pump — no way to move waste either.
If you lose power in winter here, that combination is how a manageable evening becomes a frozen pipe.
What we do not do: test your well, treat your water, or service your pump. Those are separate trades, and El Paso County Public Health handles water testing enquiries. We do the cleanup after a failure and we will tell you plainly when what you need is a pump contractor rather than us.
Colorado Springs
Because the exposure window is longer and the buildings are more spread out.
Burst risk climbs sharply below about 20°F with six or more hours of exposure — and at this elevation those conditions arrive earlier in the season, last longer, and recur more often than they do down in the metro. The Front Range crossing freezing repeatedly in a single day still applies; it just starts from a colder baseline here.
The specific failure points in this zone:
The empty-property problem is real here. A supply failure in an occupied house is a bucket. On acreage with nobody home and the nearest neighbour a quarter mile away, it runs for days.
If you leave a property here through a cold stretch: keep the heat at 55°F or above rather than off, shut the water off at the main and drain the lines if it will be empty through winter, insulate the well house, open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls, and have someone physically walk it weekly. Then tell your insurer it will be vacant — policies commonly limit or exclude freeze losses in unoccupied dwellings where reasonable heat was not maintained or the water was not shut off.
Water damage
Better in most respects, with two things worth knowing.
Better: modern supply plumbing rather than anything from the polybutylene era, current insulation and vapour detailing, modern egress, and — in a lot of cases — grading and defensible-space planning done with the fire fresh in mind.
The two catches:
Rebuild-era construction went up fast, at scale, over a compressed period. When several hundred homes are built in the same few years using the same trades and the same details, the defects repeat. That is diagnostically useful rather than alarming — if we have seen the same fitting fail two properties over, we know where to meter first.
Finished lower levels are more common in the rebuild stock than in the older rural housing it replaced. When water does get in, the loss is bigger.
The pre-fire stock that survived has its own pattern: older supply lines reaching end of life, crawl spaces rather than basements in the oldest properties, and original well and septic components now well past their design life.
Colorado Springs
Three reasons, and they stack worse than anywhere else in the county.
Dry air hides it. Low ambient humidity pulls moisture off exposed surfaces fast, so drywall faces, carpet and the top of a subfloor feel dry within a day or two while the assembly behind them is still holding water. No condensation, usually no musty smell. How a wall feels is the least reliable indicator available in this climate.
Nobody is close enough to notice. No shared wall, no neighbour hearing running water, no one seeing a stain through a window. On acreage, a leak in an outbuilding can run unnoticed for weeks.
Crawl spaces and basements nobody visits. Under a rural house or in a well house, water can sit for a long time before anyone has a reason to look.
What we do instead of guessing: meter against unaffected material of the same type in the same building, go into the crawl space rather than reasoning about it from above, photograph all of it, and give you the readings whether or not we do the reconstruction. A contractor who cannot produce a moisture log is not measuring anything.
Water damage
Longer than the metro, and we will give you a real number rather than a hopeful one.
Black Forest and Falcon are a genuine drive. Weather makes it worse — snow on Shoup Road, ice on Vollmer, or a monsoon cell sitting over the corridor all move the number. During a regional storm event, when every crew in southern Colorado is committed, it moves again.
What we commit to instead of a fast-sounding promise:
What you can do before we arrive: shut the water off at the main if the source is inside — on a well system that may mean killing power to the pump. Photograph everything before you move it. Get what you can up off the floor. Do not enter standing water that came from a septic system or from outdoors.
Call (719) 618-9013. Give us the cross roads, not the ZIP — 80908 is a big area.
📞 Call (719) 618-9013Colorado Springs
Worth saying on a page where the drive alone is substantial.
You can very likely handle it yourself if all of these are true:
Pull the carpet back, get the pad out, run a fan across the area at a low angle rather than straight down, put a dehumidifier in the room with the door closed, and check it in 48 hours.
Call if it still feels damp after two days, a musty smell develops, it reached drywall or insulation, it went under a cabinet run, it involves the septic system, or it came across the ground from outside.
Water damage
Call (719) 618-9013 — Black Forest, Falcon and rural northeast El Paso County, 24 hours a day.
📞 Call (719) 618-9013Frequently asked
IICRC-certified. We meter before we quote, and you get the readings.
24/7 — Colorado Springs and El Paso County